Michael J. Quill Irish Cultural Centre: Keeping a Catskills Festival Venue Selling Tickets, Seating Guests, and Raising Funds Online
Ongoing website management, event ticketing and reserved-seating integration, festival and Feis page builds, and the Buy-a-Brick fundraising campaign for one of the Catskills' most important Irish-American cultural organizations.
Book Your 15-Min Walkthrough Visit MJQ Irish Cultural CentreAbout MJQ Irish Cultural Centre
The Michael J. Quill Irish Cultural & Sports Centre in East Durham, NY preserves and promotes Irish and Irish-American heritage through music, dance, language, theater, and Gaelic sports. It hosts Catskills Irish Arts Week, the East Durham Feis, the East Durham Irish Festival, GAA competitions, and a full calendar of concerts and rentals.
Media Pillars has managed the Centre's website for years, working directly with the board and volunteers who run the events. It is one of the longest-standing relationships in our portfolio.
The Challenge
A festival venue lives or dies on event weekends. Ticket sales, reserved seating, performer schedules, and registration all have to work under real load, with volunteers, not developers, running the show.
The site needed to sell tickets with seat selection through Square, publish complex multi-day schedules quickly, and support fundraising, while staying stable through plugin conflicts, security tooling, and last-minute changes before live events.
What Media Pillars Built & Manages
Media Pillars serves as the Centre's outsourced web and events-technology team.
Event Ticketing & Reserved Seating
Integrated The Events Calendar, Event Tickets Plus, and a seating-chart add-on with Square payments, including ticket scanning at the door and consolidation of a legacy ticketing plugin.
Live-Event Troubleshooting & Stability
Diagnosed a firewall conflict that was blocking ticket purchases, resolved a payment webhook storm during a live event, and repaired ticket data at the database level ahead of a sold-out show.
Festival, Feis & Arts Week Pages
Built the East Durham Feis pages and syllabus, the Catskills Irish Arts Week events and performer-schedule pages, and the CIAW registration flow, each designed for fast updates every season.
Buy-a-Brick Fundraising Campaign
Redesigned the Buy a Brick landing page as a fully responsive campaign page with video and campaign graphics, and led the campaign content plan including weekly social video concepts.
Ongoing Website Care
WordPress and Avada maintenance, plugin and payment-integration updates, vendor-support escalation, and mobile bug fixes as the site evolves.
Search & Discovery
On-page SEO so the Centre's festivals, Feis, and Arts Week are found by families, dancers, and musicians planning their trip to the Catskills.
The Outcome
- Reserved-seat ticket sales run reliably through the website with Square, with issues resolved before they reach the public.
- Volunteers can publish new events, schedules, and registration pages each season without rebuilding the site.
- The Buy-a-Brick campaign has a professional landing page and content plan supporting the Centre's capital fundraising.
- A single accountable partner for hosting-level, plugin-level, and payment-level problems, escalated to vendors when needed.
- Cultural events in the Northern Catskills are discoverable in search for the people traveling to attend them.
Services Delivered
Every service on this project is something we offer to any nonprofit, venue, or events business:
Platform Stack
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Media Pillars do for the MJQ Irish Cultural Centre?
Media Pillars manages the Centre's WordPress website, its event ticketing and reserved-seating system with Square payments, builds the annual Feis, Catskills Irish Arts Week, and festival pages, and produced the Buy-a-Brick fundraising campaign page and content plan.
Can Media Pillars set up online ticketing with seat selection for my venue?
Yes. We integrate The Events Calendar, Event Tickets Plus, seating charts, and Square or other payment processors on WordPress, and we support the setup through live events.
Do you work with nonprofits and community organizations?
Yes. We work with nonprofits, cultural centres, festivals, and membership organizations, and we structure services to fit volunteer-run teams.
What happens if ticketing breaks the week of an event?
That is exactly the situation we have handled for MJQ. We diagnose plugin, firewall, and payment conflicts, fix data problems at the database level when required, and escalate to vendor support with the evidence already gathered.
Can you build a fundraising or donation landing page?
Yes. The Buy-a-Brick page for MJQ is a campaign-style landing page with video, offer framing, urgency, and mobile-first layout. We build similar pages for capital campaigns, memberships, and sponsorships.
Run a venue, festival, or nonprofit that needs its website to sell tickets and raise funds?
Book a free 15-minute walkthrough and we will map out ticketing, event pages, and fundraising for your organization.
Book Your 15-Min Walkthrough Call (518) 777-2263
